I really, really didn't want Gok Wan's new show, Gok's Fashion Fix, to be bad. Like most of the nation's right-thinking women I love the Gokster and his indefatigable drive to make women feel more confident about their bodies. But the new show, which started last week, was risky, marking a move from the formulaic image-therapy of How to Look Good Naked into proper fashion territory.

I needn't have worried though. Gok easily held his own amongst (his words) the fashionistas.

The show followed a magazine format - think Grazia on speed and the show title starts to make more sense. Gok's Fashion Fix zips frantically from one piece to another - from searching for a street style icon in Liverpool one minute to interviewing perma-tanned cigar-toting designer Roberto Cavalli the next, to a race in high heels, to interviewing Geri Halliwell about her numerous fashion faux pas. Its breathless pace makes other fashion programmes like The Clothes Show seem from a bygone era, and it makes the Trinny and Tranny transformation format look stupidly patronising.

The main thread of the programme involved Gok pitting himself against a power panel of buyers from various high-end designer stores - including Marigay McKee from Harrods, and ex-the Fall member Brix Smith-Start from East London boutique Start. The four buyers each had a budget of £2,000 to come up with an outfit that encapsulated the "romance" trend, while Gok had a more limited, but distinctly post-Primark, budget of £200.

Cut to Gok and some silent assistants sewing various bit of haberdashery on to high street dresses, with Gok explaining his thought process. He's a dab hand with a needle and thread and he does a decent job off poshing up some nasty shoes from New Look. Instead of coming across as patronising, his delivery expects a certain level of trend knowledge and his styling ideas are more or less on the money.

Meanwhile Alexa Chung is off in Italy interviewing Roberto Cavalli and he's telling her how the colour of his parrots influences his collections. Chung has garnered a decent fashion reputation over the past 18 months and some have said she could damage her style kudos by doing the show. But her post-Popworld half-sceptical, half-upbeat style of interviewing fits in seamlessly with Gokworld. That, added to the fact that Gok's power panel are all bona fide members of the fashion industry rather than cringeworthy fashion wannabes, only enhances Alexa's reputation as stylish in a non-neurotic way.

The show culminates in a catwalk-off. The People's Stylist versus the Professionals. The labels are hidden so it's a level playing field. Gok is stressing backstage and of course he's the underdog so we're all rooting for him, even though I personally didn't think that his belts would trick the audience into believing that high street looks better than Prada. Perhaps unsurprisingly the audience vote for Gok's outfits, although we didn't see the evidence and I felt a recount was needed.

Nonetheless, it's thumbs-up for a show that is unapologetically about fashion and doesn't feel the need to bother explaining who exactly Christopher Kane is, because it's assumed that the audience already knows, which feels radically modern though it shouldn't. After all, it's not as if Top Gear would explain what a Maserati is.

Gok is still enough outside the industry for him to remain plausible as the people's stylist, yet we know that secretly he knows absolutely everything about fashion so we can totally trust him too. My only worry for Gok is that he's on the verge of becoming too much of a Gordon Ramsay-style brand. The catwalk is constructed in the shape of his name, and his name appears like a logo on the side of his travelling fashion vans. There's a little too much reliance on catchphrases like "It's hardcore gorgeous" and "Gok's in town" but, so long as he loses the catwalk-off a few times in the series, I can forgive him.